


Road to Nowhere

by chavish



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-10-28 16:34:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/309841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chavish/pseuds/chavish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean, a bar, and some whiskey..</p>
            </blockquote>





	Road to Nowhere

The stranger sat alone at the bar with his whiskey and cell phone. He sat idly, his eyes glazed from ill sleeping patterns, and the double bacon cheeseburger he downed at lunch left him feeling sluggish and sick. The stool he sat on was red leather and lumpy with a hole in the right side and stuffing that fell out every time he moved. It was uncomfortable and awkward but he wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t the exact same stool he sat on in every bar in every state in every small town he ever stopped in so he couldn’t really complain. He could only decide that his head wasn’t quite fuzzy enough, his insides could stand to be numb-er, and he didn’t like seeing the scratched oak wood of the bar through the bottom of his glass. He leaned further over the bar on his elbows and waved down the bartend with a lost sense of purpose. The tender scowled, obviously not pleased with his need for constant attention, but made his way to the middle-aged man anyway and refilled him for the nth time. The male mumbled something akin to a thank you as he touched the glass to his lips and half turned toward the more occupied portion of the tavern. He sloshed the liquid in his mouth a moment and swallowed as I Hear You Knockin’ hit his ears from the old beat up jukebox making its home in the corner.  
The jukebox, a hulking thing, crackled and popped and the needle jumped every third lyric or so. It had probably seen more than one bar fight in the past judging by the copious amount of duct tape on the corners and the spider-webbed glass made it difficult to read the various artists and genres to choose from, but it left the stranger with a feeling of familiarity and false sense of comfort. He’d spent the better part of his life nomadic moving from city to city, bar to bar, hunting as many demons as he ran from, and not all of them just his. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he stopped to even think what he wanted. His whole life was like a bad Xerox copy of his father’s life, down to the flannel shirt he wore and the steel toed boots on his feet and he would be lying if some days he didn’t hate himself for his choices and where they left him at the end of the night. Green eyes monitored the people around him, their faces blurred and movements bad static in the hazy light of the bar and he could only hope he was smart enough to head back to the motel he called home for the night before the black rim beginning to edge his vision completely closed in.  
Behind his back the thick wood door of the joint opened and a sound just as familiar as a scratchy old jukebox reached through the smokey air and into his brain. It was the click-clack of plastic on wood, the noise of the world of feminism stabbing against the realm of man and denting it successfully with every purposeful step. The stepper in question walked in demanding all the attention in the world without a word. Her legs were long, tan, and covered by only the beige short skirt brushing her thighs as she swept through the crowd. The stranger found himself oddly focused specifically on the unnecessarily high heels and a thought that had never crossed his mind fought its way to the front lines of the civil war between sobriety and drunkenness happening in his head: How did she walk in those? She didn’t just walk, maybe that he could brush off, but her movement could only be classified as more of a glide and that only served to baffle him further. His brows furrowed, knitting closely together as he gnawed his inner cheek in concentration. On any other night the heels would have only served to sober his senses, like the smell of the hunt to a predator, bringing on a different sort of dizziness than the alcohol was leaving him with. He’d have abandoned his whiskey and advanced with the accuracy of a heat seeking missile and when reached her she would have abandoned all hope. He would have introduced himself with all the confidence in the world, “Hi, I’m Dean.” Or Kurt, or Jason, or whatever he was calling himself that day and sat down with that age old smolder and twitch of the eyebrow that had sent many a female swooning before her. But tonight, for reasons unknown to him, he found no interest in her something coloured hair, and her whatever style shirt, or even what he assumed were tastefully chosen accessories she probably spent hours choosing in front of her mirror. His eyes refused to wander any higher than the straps at her ankles no matter how much he tried to make himself ogle further. He apparently found something hypnotizing in the black snake print pillars that were about as thick as the straw in the man’s mojito three seats down from him. Surely they were too weak to carry that much weight. The woman was far from heavy, if anything she was probably underweight, even so something so small should never take on anything weighing more than a few pounds. There had to be some trick to it. Why wasn’t she toppling side to side with each step? Why weren’t they breaking in half, bending at the base, collapsing like an accordion? What was it? Each question left him more and more frustrated.  
The woman stopped somewhere near the center of the bar and continued her balancing act shifting with boredom from one heel to the other and back again. She teetered always just on the edge of a hole in the floor making the stranger nervous and adding the question as to how she never slipped into the spaces between the boards or the knots in the wood, why she always knew just where to step. She stood on one foot now, her left hooked around her leg, her right foot wobbling with a false unsteadiness similar to the fake smile she probably wore on her lips as she talked to a group of faceless men in a booth and somewhere in his gawking the stranger’s mood grew severely more moribund than before. In the background I Hear You Knockin’ bled seamlessly into Ozzy’s Road to Nowhere and it may have been the liquor talking nonsense in his ear but the stranger began wondering why women wore heels to begin with. He looked down at his grimy clothes, the grass stained, mud printed jeans on his legs and ran a hand through his hair that was growing greasier as the night went on and realized he didn’t care.  
He could care less if he was disheveled or bruised because it never affected his life in the least that he didn’t dress nice, or look always so very washed or shaven. But any female he had ever known had tried to make herself up in some way; wore nice jeans or got a new flattering hair cut when they could. The stranger turned back to the bar and tried to think of all the women he’d known over the years and how many females he’d been with that washed their makeup off at the end of the night and hated what they saw underneath.  
The stranger had spent so much time changing his name, changing his identity that most days he could pretend nothing was wrong. He could shuffle through other personas and dress himself as another being and everything was fine. But he slowly acknowledged in his haze that he spent more time lying to himself than everyone around him. It suddenly struck him as odd that never noticed before this time, half drunk, his stomach eating itself from the grease and boose, and his legs feeling hollow, that his life wasn’t much of a life. Sure it had crossed his mind before the he wasn’t ‘conventional’ but the fact that he never had one steady place to call his own outside of his car or a person to call or a friend to hug or a big comfy chair with a cat curled in his lap had never really concerned him enough to think about it until now. He couldn’t really even call the car his own considering he had stolen that from his father too. He flexed his calloused hands and saw his father’s hands, dirt under the nails, the right ring finger slightly crooked and his left thumb smashed purple to Hell and back again. Under the counter his father’s shoes beat a rhythm against the wooden bar, his father’s green eyes looked around and he felt his father’s scruffy beard sprouting from his untouched 5’o’clock shadow.  
Grazing his stubby nails across his scruff he suddenly wondered who he could have been if he had been left alone to make his own future growing up. If he hadn’t spent his life being molded into a carefully chosen path. At one point in his life he remembered wanting a kid, wanting a wife, but now that wasn’t an option. The thought of settling made his brain itch and his mouth dry. No one deserved the baggage he was carrying and no one but he could handle it without breaking like the thin heels should have been under the woman.  
On him was all the weight of the expectations that everyone had ever foolishly put on him and he had even more foolishly accepted with no complaint. All the time he knowing full well he’d implode sooner or later but lying to himself that he was strong enough to handle it. His father, his brother, and what few friends he managed to keep for longer than a bar stayed open piled on him. Even complete strangers found a shoulder to cry and added pounds, weighting him closer to the breaking point. He played the game, put on a show, and smiled through the balancing act of everyone else around him. He spent his time concerning himself with supporting those he loved and anyone else that wandered into his life. Everything he did consisted of watching his step and trying his hardest not to slip through the cracks. If he ever fell over the edge no one would ever bother to find him for less than selfish reasons. He did this all without a word and ignored any discomfort or spine breaking repercussions that always followed whether he liked to admit to it or not.  
The fact of the matter was, while everyone came to him for help, when he stopped long enough to remember to feel anything about himself, he realized he had no one. His problems never struck him as worth the time of others and he never quite cared that he never had anyone to fall on and that had evolved into him not wanting anyone. But that no one tried hurt worse than anything else. Everyone assumed he was okay regardless of the circles under his eyes or the bruises on his arms and bloodied knuckles regularly went over looked.  
Downing the rest of his whiskey the stranger grew tired of his racing thoughts and tossed some wadded bills and surplus change from his pocket onto the bar leaving a generous tip. Turning, he nearly smacked into a pair of blue eyes and long brown hair. Red lips smiled something devilish at him causing the burger in the stranger’s stomach to flip something awful. She was pretty, he was certain, but he hardly registered it, her breasts and small waist, nice hips and full thighs making up one figure in a thousand that he had seen before. Finding the female company unappealing for once he let a bad excuse for a smile crack his face awkwardly before walking around her shoving his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders. He could practically feel the woman’s sense of rejection boring thing his back, eating away the leather jacket and flannel and he only looked back once but his eyes stayed close to the floor checking only to confirm what he already assumed. Standing in front of the white stuffing wonderland he had called his own at the bar were the snake print heels planted firmly with the weight of the world on them. He laughed a little pushing the door open and letting the damp air hit his face. His walk was steady, a natural lean in his step, the alcohol making his head buzz nicely as he swaggered toward his car. The neon sign out front basked the old Impala in various bright oranges and pinks and the gravel parking lot ground against his boots and he didn’t care. He didn’t care that he wasn’t going home to a nice bed and a cat curled in his lap. He didn’t care that where he was going was moldy with the wallpaper falling off and no one was waiting for him. He didn’t care that his hair was greasy and his shirt was wrinkled and his pants hadn’t been washed in days. The mud on his boots didn’t concern him, the ashy smell of the bar didn’t bother him, and as for the sweet smell of whiskey on his breath…well, no one was there to complain.  
Whatever he had felt in the bar had passed. Whatever the woman in the heels had managed to disrupt and dislodge had successfully tucked itself neatly away back within the deep confines of his brain where it belonged. He reached his car and plugged the key into the door the smell of leather gracing his nostrils as he slid into the seat. His hands cupped his mouth for warmth before pulling his collar up a little more and settling in to bring the motor to life. The stranger put the car into gear and pulled out onto the main road back to the motel a small smile on his lips as he reached over to turn up the radio. Ramblin’ Man mixed with the cloud of exhaust he left behind him and a streetlight went out. He hated cats anyway.


End file.
